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Sunday, 16 November 2014

Historic advantages of immigrant selling skills to English Trade and Commerce

The
political football that is immigration, has been kicked about in England for
hundreds of years.

Recently our Prime Minister, David
Cameron has outlined some plans to cut the level of migration from the EU by limiting the number
of new national insurance numbers available to low skilled immigrants. The timing of this is probably not unrelated to the forthcoming political by-election in Rochester next Thursday 20th November 2014.

Yet for business to thrive immigrants are part of the deal particularly as far as trade and Professional Selling is concerned.

Such
actions on European immigrants have a long history in England.

Back in the day, the prosperity of the Hanse merchants, who
were in direct competition with those of the City of London, induced Queen
Elizabeth I to suppress the Steelyard
and rescind its privileges in 1598.

James I reopened the
Steelyard, but it never again carried the weight it formerly had in London.

Most of the buildings of the Steelyard were destroyed during the Great Fire
of London in 1666

﻿﻿

In the tiles that line Fruiterers Passage on the Thames Path in the City of Londonis a reproduction of

1616 engraving of London

by Claes Janszoon Visscher

detail of above showing the 'Stilliarde'

I
was walking along the Thames path in the City of London last Saturday and came
across a street sign “ Hanseatic Walk”.

Seven
hundred years ago in this location, German merchants set up a trading post or a kontor
in this area under the auspices of the Hanseatic league .

For the next six
hundred years they built up a thriving business conclave. There is little one can see of it today
but the history is kept alive through street signs.

As the Thames path goes under the Canon
Street Railway station the sign reads ‘Steelyard Passage’.

Out of hidden loud
speakers the sounds ofthe works of the
trading wharfs is played to evoke a past not evident by today’s buildings:a
huge gym complex, Nomura Bank and the railway arches of Canon Street and Fuller Pub "The Banker".

The
Steelyard was located on the north bank of the Thames by the outflow of the
Walbrook, in the Dowgate ward of the City of London.

The site is now covered by
Cannon Street station and commemorated in the name of Steelyard Passage.

The Steelyard,
like other Hansa stations, was a separate walled community with its own
warehouses on the river, its own weighing house, chapel, counting houses and
residential quarters.

The first mention of a Hansa Almaniae (a "German
Hansa") in English records is in 1282, concerning merely the community of
the London trading post, only later to be made official as the Steelyard and
confirmed in tax and customs concessions granted by Edward I, in a Carta
Mercatoria ("merchant charter") of 1303.

The true power of the
Hanse in English trade came later, in the 15th century, as the German
merchants, led by those of Cologne expanded their premises and extended their
reach into the cloth-making industry of England.

This led to constant
friction over the legal position of English merchants in the Hanseatic towns
and Hanseatic privileges in England, which repeatedly ended in acts of
violence.

Not only English wool
but finished cloth was exported through the Hansa, who controlled the trade in
Colchester and other cloth-making centres

In 1475 the
Hanseatic League finally purchased the London site outright and it became
universally known as the Steelyard.

Lübeck, Bremen and
Hamburg only sold their common property, the London Steelyard, to the South
Eastern Railway in 1852.

Cannon Street station
was built on the site and opened in 1866

Commemorative plaque of six hundred years of peaceful selling
by Germans in the City of London

In
1988 remains of the former Hanseatic trading house, once the largest medieval
trading complex in Britain, were uncovered by archaeologists during maintenance
work on Cannon Street Station

So why
is this on my mind ?

I
am off to run a Selling Skills programme in Hamburg next weekor to give the city its true title Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg-the free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg.

View of the Southbank from where the
Hanseatic Steelyard stood

“The old collapses, it changes the time and new life blossoms in the ruins.” --Schiller

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About Me

I have been a training consultant for 30 years.
I also research Buyers Views of Sales people for an ongoing research study I have done for the last twelve years
The majority of photographs, videos and audios in this blog are taken on my new Fujifilm Fine pix T from May 2012 The Pencil Sketches are mine also